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Union took three years to get right. Childs waited out anxious months for Ricketts' continued collaboration, while he worked on Boomtown. Mostly on sheer instinct, she went from Los Angeles to Swaziland and Zambia to search out a choir and found two. The Sibane Semaswati Singers and the New Generation, who show no traces of a Paul Simon-Graceland influence, are on five of the album's tracks, lending rhythmic backbone whenever Childs' writing tends too much toward the brittle. They also summon ironic memories from Childs' past, casting a kind of sanctified shadow across a childhood spent within the often unwelcome reach of the church.
Childs' mother was, and remains, a staunch member of Assemblies of God, and her maternal grandparents were both Assemblies missionaries. Childs and her three brothers "weren't allowed to listen to pop music or rock or even go to the movies. There was a lot I missed out on." There was a lot she made up for too, as well as a lot she probably could have done without. Her mother and father moved the family every year or so, from little towns in California's San Joaquin Valley to places in Arkansas and Oklahoma no bigger than a post- office box. Dad departed when Toni was twelve, telling the kids just before he left that he was in fact their stepfather. Their real father turned out to be a man who dropped by from time to time, always introduced as a "family friend."
It is a familiar case history of rebelliousness -- hard scuffles, bad drugs, determined excess and scrapping to sing -- but Childs played it faster and tougher than most. At 20, trying to keep a band together, she got busted on a drug rap and did three months in a federal penitentiary. "It was," she says, with uncharacteristic understate ment, "a very big scare-the-hell-out-of-me situation." Fellow inmates included a "couple of Manson girls and murderers and all kinds of things. And Patty Hearst too. I liked her." On the outside again, Childs sought more conventional means of supporting the band, which split up anyway. She took off for London, worked in a friend's recording studio in exchange for living space and lessons on the equipment, even hawked her first single before heading back to Los Angeles, and new unions of all kinds.
With the album behind her, and final plans being made for a summer tour, Childs is forging a fresh perspective. She has got in touch with her family. She is thinking about a second record ("I want Indian percussion, African voices and an Indonesian influence"). If she can get an album like Union from a single relationship, the music she makes from the rest of her life should really be extraordinary.